Scarf*oo

If you haven’t decided to drop IE6 support, this might be the right time to do it. The article CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 over at Smashing Magazine is a great reference to CSS differences between various IE versions when handling advanced CSS rules. Looks like versions 7 and up already support the vast majority of rules you throw at them, so if you want to take advantage of advanced CSS selectors to ease styles development, go on, I don’t believe many will be hurt in the process.

Too bad that there are still many clients running and demanding your product to run on IE6. At least in my case, 80% of the clients are of the aforementioned sort and I am in no position to change that. It’s a sad sad thing really.

Someone should really write a conditionally included universal CSS file to handle IE6 bugs and just be off with it. On the other hand, there are other approaches such as providing a universal readable and pleasant style just for IE6 users and hoping the clients will be happy with it.

Check the proposed style in question at Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS | For A Beautiful Web.

While I loved playing Lemmings, I never loved playing with IE. After spending a full week in bed, this is the first news I ended up stumbling into – IE8 Has Arrived. My head is still swimming around from the fever, so you’ll excuse me for not delving into the depths of this release.

Ever happened to you that after applying one of the many solutions for fixing IE’s png background image support, links on that element didn’t work? How about repeating background images? I bet most of you will nod in agreement. Well, Drew Diller from dillerdesign.com‘s got the solution for you. While his script fails to apply PNGs to the body element and to an img tag (for now), it solves the problem with background-position and background-repeat.

All you have to do is call the following script and voila, your headaches are over:

<!--[if IE 6]>
<script src="DD_belatedPNG.js"></script>
<script>
    DD_belatedPNG.fix('.png_bg'); //EXAMPLE
</script>
<![endif]-->

Head over to the DD_belatedPNG page for downloads and more examples.

The People at RNIB have released the Surf Right Toolbar, which is — you guessed it — a toolbar for IE, which is designed to bring to the surface the often hidden accessibilty settings, such as turning javascript and images on/off, changing text size and so on.

Quoting:
“The Surf Right Toolbar is really for anyone who wants to adjust the way they view content on the web to make it easier to read. This could include people with mild disabilities, the elderly, people with reading problems, cognitive problems, using dial-up, photosensitivity and so on.”

You can grab the beta, right here.

“We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.”
– Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager Internet Explorer

So the flames have extinguished? Read more on the subject.

Sooner than later we may be dropped into a world of version targeting and forward compatibility, when it comes to web development. The basic idea is to use a meta declaration to specify which browsers and versions our web page intends to support. For example, writing:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7;FF=2" />

… would say that our page was tested and works on IE version 7 and Firefox version 2, for example.

Now, the problem I see here is in actual browser support for backwards-compatibility rendering. Do we really believe that once IE 10 is out, our IE=7 will still work? If you ask me, this is a recipe for failure.

Read more on the subject on alistapart.com, for some enlightening articles on the subject.

If I could, I’d give you a special present this christmas – I’d tell you how to make IE on Windows behave like a grown-up browser. Sadly, reality sucks – as does IE on Windows – so I can only offer to share with you a couple of CSS tips to ease the pain of working with that piece of crappy software.
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I believe I owe some people a beer or two now that hell actually froze over. Believe it or not, but the current milestone of internet explorer 8 passes the unforgivable ACID2 test with full votes!

I am pretty sure that every web designer found himself stuck with one or more of Internet Explorer’s annoying bugs and usually he ended up using css hacks to isolate the problem(s). Well, I believe hacks should be used with caution, if used at all, since you never know what adverse effects it may have on your web site with future browser updates.

Fortunately IE developers provided us with a neat solution to this problem with conditional comments. Just what are conditional comments? Basically they are common html comments with an extended syntax. They are completely transparent to all non-IE browsers, so they validate and are much more future-proof than hacks will ever be.

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